Apple

Citigroup recently upgraded Amazon, saying more kindles will be sold than previously thought. The leading etailers stock zoomed upwards on the news in fact.

The analyst estimates Amazon will sell up to 380,000 Kindles in 2008, up from a previous forecast of 190,000. It expects Kindle-related revenue of $1 billion by 2010, compared with a previous view of $400 million to $750 million.

Many have surmised that Bezos wants the kindle to be the iPod or iPhone of books. Question is, do we already have an iPod of books and is it the iPhone?

Obviously there are trade offs between the iPhone and Kindles -- the iPhone has a color screen and worse battery life while the Kindle is better for reading large amounts of content.

I got to thinking about this as I noticed that Frommer Travel Guides are now available (press release) on the iPhone.

Good news: I have noticed plane fares for trips to ITEXPO this September 16-18, 2008 in Los Angeles have dropped by hundreds of dollars in many cases. As a show organizer, nothing makes me happier than having our event more accessible to everyone.

The Internet Telephony event has really evolved over this past decade and is now the the largest gathering of IP communications companies and decision makers in the world. It is the one place to be if you manage communications for a service provider, enterprise or are a reseller/developer.

You just have to be at this show if you want to network with the industry and see what is next and what is happening right now.

So I am happy to share the good news with you all and I hope to see you in September... In LA.

This past weekend the DVR in my house started to make an odd and intermittent buzzing noise. Suffice it to say it needs to go back to my cable operator. As I recall, the last time I had a DVR problem, a technician was sent to my house to bring a new box.

Having to deal with a truck roll every few years for a customer with one DVR doesn't seem like a smart proposition for a carrier. There just isn't enough profit margin to justify this cost.

The good news for Cablevision the company providing service in my area is that an appeals court just ruled that network DVR I just like CPE DVR but with a very long cord.

Media companies fought and won a court case which blocked Cablevision from providing such service and in April of last year Cablevision decided to appeal.

A look at my inbox confirms the findings of research which tells us that 80% of e-mail comes from illegitimate or unknown sources.

Officials say the study relies on a sample of 2.3 million IPs pulled from the Return Path Reputation Data Network, a cooperative data network that collects and analyzes e-mail data from more than 20 ISPs and other data providers representing more than 100 million mailboxes.

The spam problem is not going away and as I came back from Dallas yesterday I happened to be on a rental car shuttle bus around 6:00 AM in the morning. On the bust was a group of people with Blackberrys frantically clicking and scrolling. I could almost feel the spam being deleted from their devices as we drove the 15 or so minutes from the rental car areas to the terminal.

I kept thinking how much wasted time we all have in our lives because of spam.

Please don't tell me about spam filters. Yes I have one of these like many of you but if you have ever looked at what gets filtered you will see that there are occasional real and important emails in there that you need to receive.

Years back I coined a term Just in Time Communications (JITC) to encompass the idea of removing latency from human communications. Art Rosenberg is credited with coining the term Unified Communications and he often writes on the matter. JITC did not stick as a term but UC did.

The funny thing is Art's most recent article talks about removing the latency from UC and reminds me exactly why I liked the term JITC to begin with -- it is this human latency that needs to be removed from the equation.

I am not reopening the discussion of which term makes the most sense. I want the undustry to move forward and grow and term wars are really stupid.

As fuel prices increase, so does the desire to come up with reasonable alternatives. Some of these efforts revolve around conservation and others have to do with new technologies which make it possible to bypass oil, coal and natural gas.

Today is an unusual day as we have new examples in each category. Detroit has a new mobile web traffic monitoring service which is ad supported and allows drivers to tap into 600 traffic cameras. The theory here is you will see where the traffic is and drive around it.

Seems like the rumors were true. Ribbit was sold to BT for $105 million according to ZDnet. Here are some thoughts on the matter from Andy Abramson as well.

Why would BT buy a company focused on communications development? The primary reason is that they see communications changing rapidly and they want to be on the leading, not trailing edge of this trend.